If nothing comes of Fulton County’s admission, the implication will be that election laws can be treated as optional rather than binding.
Under state statute, each ballot scanner is required to produce tabulation tapes at the close of voting, and poll workers must sign those tapes to certify the reported totals. These signed tapes are not merely an administrative safeguard. They are central to determining whether the vote count itself is legitimate.
The tapes certify that each machine began the day at zero, that no residual data from prior elections or test runs remained on the memory cards, and that the final totals were fixed the moment voting closed. Without signed tabulation tapes, there is no verifiable starting point and no verifiable endpoint. In legal terms, there is no verified election result. Yet in Fulton County, hundreds of thousands of early votes that were never lawfully certified were still included in the official totals.